While some design teams will stick to VHDL-93 until the sun burns out, some people are using as much of the new VHDL-2008 standard as is supported by their tools. Big question is: how much is actually supported by which tools?

Spoiler Alert: The market leader in VHDL 2008 is Aldec.

The script

I’ve created a small script that can test your compiler against a set of VHDL files to see which constructs are supported. This is very much a work in progress. At this time, the script only deals with vcom compilers (Aldec RivieraPro, Active-HDL and Mentor Graphics ModelSim). If anybody can help and provide extensions for other commercial (or free?) compilers, that would be great!

Also, the script only tests a limited set of VHDL-2008 features. If you want to test your favorite feature, please feel free to contribute.